Get a good look at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot while you can. The giant storm as we know it today is shrinking, and it might fade into memory within your lifetime.
NASA’s $1 billion Juno probe took stunning photos of the Great Red Spot in July 2017 — the closest images we’ve ever gotten of the giant tempest. Scientists were floored by the level of detail beamed back by the spacecraft.
….But Orton said the Great Red Spot, and other long-lived storms on Jupiter, still won’t go on forever.
“In truth, the GRS has been shrinking for a long time,” he said.
In the late 1800s, the storm was perhaps as wide as 30 degrees longitude, Orton said. That works out to more than 35,000 miles — four times the diameter of Earth. When the nuclear-powered spacecraft Voyager 2 flew by Jupiter in 1979, however, the storm had shrunk to a bit more twice the width of our own planet.
“Now it’s something like 13 degrees wide in longitude and only 1.3 times the size of the Earth,” he said. “Nothing lasts forever.”
A signature storm on planet Neptune is also vanishing, ongoing Hubble telescope observations show. That storm is as large as a continent on Earth, but may disappear in a few years, according to Space.com.
The remaining lifetime of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter isn’t much better.
“The GRS will in a decade or two become the GRC (Great Red Circle),” Orton said. “Maybe sometime after that the GRM” — the Great Red Memory.